Heath's great gamble: Phase 3, the General Election and beyond
A very great deal hangs upon the outcome of the next General Election and, in their different ways, both the Liberal and the Labour parties at their annual conferences have recognised this, as indeed did, with notable statesmanship, the delegates at the Trades Union Congress. The Conservative Party is less wellplaced to hold a conference which is truly deliberative, let alone ,decisive, because of the authoritarian pre-eminence accorded to its leader, especially one who is also Prime Minister; it is for him to lay down the law, to say what the policies of the Party are, whatever delegates might think they should be. The ritual whereby on Saturday the Conservative Party conference turns itself into a mass rally which unites itself behind its chosen Leader and applauds his exhortations is a very public demonstration of this state of affairs. Mr Heath himself is, in addition, a powerful Prime Minister in his own right. His senior colleagues in the Cabinet are weaker, as politicians and potential rivals, as king-deposers and king-makers, than they were a couple of years ago, when it was much easier to imagine Lord Carrington, Mr Whitelaw and Sir Alec Douglas-Home telling Mr Heath it was his duty to go than it is now. And in any event, what would be the point of such a putsch, when no one in the Cabinet is better fitted than Mr Heath to be Prime Minister and Leader of the Party? The Heath government is engaged in a great gamble and it is the Prime Minister who is throwing the dice: as long as the gambling continues, why change the gambler? If he wins the game, he may also conceivably yin the General Election. If he loses, he will certainly lose the Prime Ministership and also, presumably, the Leadership of the Conservative Party. Mr Heath's power depends upon him winning, first, his gamble with the economy, and second, the General Election. It does not follow that if his gamble on growth comes off, he will lead his party to electoral victory — for the country's sourness with his European policy must provide a massive electoral liability even if the present economic policies . do not lead to the collapse of the currency; but it must surely follow that if his gamble fails and the inflationary process ac celerates, then the public recognition of this failure, piled upon its hostility to the Common Market, will ensure an electoral defeat tor the party lie leads.
There is not a great deal this Conservative Party conference can do to make a Heath victory more likely. Mr Heath himself can inspire his audience, so that they return to their constituencies determined to silence their doubts and work to regain the ground lost to the Liberal Party. But the Prime Minister will neither seek for follow guidance from the rank and file of the party he leads: he knows, as well as they do, that the new conservatism he Offered in 1970 has crumbled, and that during the time of his administration the policies actually pursued represent a much greater lurch to the left than the much-publicised lurch which the Labour Party. described last week. This week's conference was preceded by the announcement of the detailed proposals of Phase 3 of the prices and incomes policy: and this in itself is sufficient measure of the distance this Conservative administration has moved, so that its present industrial and economic Policies are carbon copies of those policies desired, and to some extent pursued, by Mr Wilson's Labour government, and ridiculed by Mr Heath at the last general election. Those policies are hostile to free enterprise, and will never enthuse the Con servative Party; nor, in the time left between now and the General Election, will the European cause invigorate the local party workers. Mr Heath is worst-placed of all party leaders to play the patriotic card. What he needs, therefore, is either a kind of economic miracle flowing from his gamble on growth (whatever the risk to sterling) or a public which, having looked at the Liberal revivalists, and having considered the implications of the Labour Party's united left-wing front, sullenly contemplates another five years of Heath rule as the least of the available evils. The public will have a pretty good idea of what a Heath victory would entail; it cannot have anything like so clear an idea of the consequences of a Heath defeat. If Mr Heath's nerve holds he still has a chance, unless of course the people regain their own nerve and run a calculated risk of throwing him out, repudiating his polkcies and opening the way for new measures and men.
The Prime Minister's nerve is considerable and unlikely to snap. His chance, therefore, depends very much on whether or not the Phase 3 programme he announced amid the ornate splendours of Lancaster House on Monday afternoon will wreck his gamble on growth. He needs to keep wages as low as possible, in his analysis, so that prices, especially 'export prices,' are themselves kept as low as possible. In part Mr Heath and his colleagues have made a political calculation, asking themselves, "What is the least increase in wages we can permit which will not produce major strikes which secure the public's backing?" Their snappy catch answer to the trade union leaders is " Take your pick: either £2.25 or 7 per cent., whichever you please." These increase in themselves, the Government obviously realises, are too low to be acceptable without some fancy packaging: hence an extra 1 per cent for ' efficiency ' (as opposed to 'productivity '); generous gestures towards those in 'anomalous ' situations, in London, working 'unsocial' hours, and women; and a cost-of-living ' safeguard' whereby if the index rises by no less than 7 per cent from now negotiators will be able to bargain for an extra 40p a week, with a further 40p for each one point increase thereafter. In what amounted to an autumnal mini-budget the Prime Minister also added 9p to the employers' weekly National Insurance contribution, gave the Old Age pensioners a Christmas present, had some very small words of comfort for those who have not bought their first home yet, and told the clearing banks that in view of their excess profits they would get no interest from the Bank of England from the special deposits they banked with the old lady. Mr Heath also, and probably more to his point, extended price controls so that the thousand medium-sized companies are brought within the purview of the Prices Commission. Will there be a Phase 4 next year, to rope in all the rest? The Prime Minister demurred. Did he propose to go to the country on ,a policy of wages and prices control? "The question of going to the country doesn't arise. We're going to carry this policy through," Mr Heath said.
But the question does arise, and will indeed be asked, and very bluntly at that: "Will this policy help to win the election?" Time will tell. But it will be surprising if the craft unions will settle for 7 per cent. And it will be odd if the public, requiring substantial cuts in government expenditure, think much of the government's sense of priorities, when Mr Heath pares £15 million off defence expenditure and another £100 million off the schools and hospi tals building programmes, yet perseveres with the Concorde, the Channel Tunnel and Maplin. Mr Heath is determined to put all our individual houses in order; but he is most reluctant to put his Government's house in order. Phase 3—itself another gamble— seems therefore more likely than not to wreck his gamble on growth, and thereby damage his electoral prospects.
Some General Elections are a good deal more important than others; and the next one looks like being very important indeed. Should Mr Heath win, with a workable majority, then it may fairly safely be prophesied that he will remain in power for the rest of this decade, by which time he will have accomplished a kind of revolution which will indeed amount to a " radical change in the style of government" which he promised us during the last election, although whether the revolution he will have achieved is the one he set out to accomplish is an entirely different matter. He will have very greatly reduced the authority of the House of Commons; he will have destroyed that of the House of Lords; the Crown will have become a cypher, no longer the fount of hereditary honour; and the chief decisions affecting the country will be taken in Brussels. At the same time, the careers of most of the principal politicians of this country will have come to an end. Many will be too old, and many others will conclude that the party political fight in the United Kingdom is no longer worth fighting, and will have dropped out of politics or have sought to make their political fortunes inside the institutions of Europe. It is unlikely that any major Conservative politicians, inside or outside the Cabinet, would be able or even willing to sustain a position of political power and influence within the Party for another five years or more of Mr Heath's rule. At the same time, the Labour Party, faced with another long spell of Opposition, would seek a new set of leaders, some of whom would almost certainly consider the use of industrial action to secure political ends. And given this assumed Heath victory, Mr Thorpe's Liberal Party would be seen to have had yet another of its freakish mid-term revivals, and be prey to its own red guards.
It may be considered foolish to look still further ahead; but it is not fanciful to envisage a future in which the people have seen control pass to politicians and sbureaucrats in Brussels, and have come to the realisation that the country has been turned into an offshore island and the lickspittle of a rejuvenated France. In such a future, unless a degree of material prosperity comparable with that enjoyed by our continental partners is achieved (and every indication is that, on the contrary, we will get progressively worse off), there would be room for a massive political discontent which this country has not known since the seventeenth century. Once again, the parliamentarians might have to regroup themselves, put aside all other differences, and Unite to re-establish the authority of a House of Commons which had been so diminished. In this event, Mr Heath's revolution would itself call forth another one, much as the authoritarian excess of the first two Stuarts called forth the parliamentarian reaction which finally substituted the power of the Commons for the sovereignty of the Crown.
This scenario smacks somewhat of the melodramatic; and certainly it is possible to envisage a different development given a Heath victory, in which the country slowly and steadily and with a fairly benign resignation continues with that process of degeneration and decline which some now claim to be already a century or more old, but which others, taking a more modest view of such perspectives, would locate between Suez and the Macmillan era of "You've never had it so good" and of the "wind of change ". What is, however, daily becoming more difficult to envisage is the future as promised by the visionary marketeers, with a British economy revitalised by European competition and the access to that particular market providing the power-base for British politicians brilliantly to capture the leadership of a new Europe itself able to treat on equal terms with the super-powers and indeed entitled, because of the superior intelligence and experience of the Europeans, to anticipate the time not far off when the leadership of the world itself would be back where it belongs, in a united Europe in which the United Kingdom's voice was, if not the weightiest, at least the most respected and influential. That is a dream scarcely anyone now even remotely pretends he will wake up to find happening. Yet this was Mr Heath's dream, and the promise he held out.
Previous page
